Jocelyne Guilbault

Series: Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology

Calypso music is an integral part of Trinidad's national identity.
When, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the great
Trinidadian musician Roaring Lion where he was from, Lion famously
replied "the land of calypso." But in a nation as diverse as
Trinidad, why is it that calypso has emerged as the emblematic
music?
In" Governing Sound," Jocelyne Guilbault examines the conditions
that have enabled calypso to be valorized, contested, and targeted
as a field of cultural politics in Trinidad. The prominence of
calypso, Guilbault argues, is uniquely enmeshed in projects of
governing and in competing imaginations of nation, race, and
diaspora. During the colonial regime, the period of national
independence, and recent decades of neoliberal transformation,
calypso and its musical offshoots have enabled new cultural
formations while simultaneously excluding specific social
expressions, political articulations, and artistic traditions.
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic work, Guilbault maps the
musical journeys of Trinidad's most prominent musicians and
arrangers and explains the distinct ways their musical
sensibilities became audibly entangled with modes of governing,
audience demands, and market incentives.
Generously illustrated and complete with an accompanying CD,"
Governing Sound" constitutes the most comprehensive study to date
of Trinidad's carnival musics.